Gwendolyn MacEwen: Dining Out, a fabulous smorgasbord

Brett is not mythically alone when it comes to illuminating cuisine . Gwendolyn MacEwen is perhaps the most mythopoetically consistent poet in modern Canadian poetry, although she abhored the term, which in my view would be like Bacchus denying that there was something in the grapes that magical . In 1987 at the age of 46 she died from complications due to alcoholism, a demonic spectre that has traditionally preyed upon poets laboring at their lonely craft. Although eight years her senior I came to depend on MacEwen as a mentor who shared my mythic views on poetry , although she would have shunned the term , mythopoetic, even if she believed that there was a connection between magic madness and poetry.

In an early poem, A Breakfast for Barbarians, written in the early sixties. MacEwen takes a more passive approach to a hearty repast than Brett does. MacEwen's hunger written from a feminine perspective is softer . However, they both dine out metaphysically in rarefied atmospheres of their own choosing. In one case, the cerebral chef is temperamentally in the mode of an English country squire, and in the other, a Nefertite styled priestess confessing to a strange satiny hunger in that poem. She invites her friends to joy her in an ultimate meal appealing to them to indulge their voracious appetite.

my friends, my sweet barbarians,
there is that hunger which is not food-
but an eye at the navel turns the appetite
round
with visions of some fabulous sandwich
the brain's golden breakfast
eaten with beasts
with books on a plate

No hammered metal plates there for a drowsy priestess. This poet while spartan in her meals aims for the mythopoetic right from the start. She abhorred, it is true, that literary phrase, and her biographer, Rosemary Sullivan would agree, but why then does her muse have an "eye at the navel." and that eye, third eye, if you please, "turns the appetite around." Unlike Brett there is no raging defiance here, but a gentility in which the poet asks others to share in the "brain's golden breakfast"

The meal of MacEwen incorporates "an anthology of recipes," for which she wants to "edit for breakfast." And her answer to hunger is to answer it " with boiled chimera." Her recipe also includes " an arcane salad of spiced bibles," and " tossed dictionaries---"

She sees "a hewn wood table" not too different from the table Brett serves his bibulous and sometimes bellicose fellow bards, and neither would he or his companions take offence to being called Barbarians. Yet MacEwen's hunger , if you read into the poem , seems eerily real . She urges her starving friends to gorge themselves until we are no more able/ to jack up the jaws any longer .

There is a muted silken stoicism in her attempt to conceal a very physical hunger at the Savarin, a popular in Toronto in the early sixties, on Bay Street, in Toronto's financial district, where for a set price you could keep going back to the infinite buffet for a second helping , seize a lobster claw, shrimp, a salad, and pile it on your pedestrian plate, where a Sunday brunch could get" stranger and stranger," as a starved poet attacked that buffet and got more than their money's worth. But the poet is not alone in her pursuits at the buffet; There is the flavor of guilt in that " impossible pyramid of food" Another diner joins her at the adjoining table and she and the stranger attack that pyramid of food. She sums up the flavor of the food stating I eat in shame.

MacEwen Consults Priapic Layton

MacEwen, according to her biographer, Rosemary Sullivan, sought out Irving Layton ( described unkindly by Sullivan as Canada's priapic poet, a reputation not unearned as Layton wrote what was then considered highly erotic poetry, at a time when you could not get a drink in Toronto on a Protestant Sunday) to ask him why no woman had poetically celebrated sex the way he did. She complain that " the only real women I know are women who have something of the man in them . . . and men who have something of the woman" Sullivan suggests that Gwendolyn had bought into the sixties' illusion that her creative life could develop if only she talked of women's sexuality more in her poetry. Was MacEwen in advance of her time?

Consider what is currently happening in the feminist literary and artistic movement, where we find women making movies about other women's sexuality, going against the grain in a male dominated industry? Perhaps Layton had an early influence in how she would invent herself and instill her sexuality in her

Was it purely accidental that she embraced the mythic pharonic couple, Akhenaton and Nefertiti, her idols, and and then go on in a sexy way to choose the ace British Imperialist of the World War I, Lawrence of Arabia, and making his military exploits, the subject of a volume of her poems titled The T.E. Lawrence Poems (Mosaic Press/Valley Editions, Oakville, Ontario, Canada, 1982) . For MacEwen, the inspirational source on Lawrence came from his brilliant autobiography, Seven Pillars of Wisdom..

According to Sullivan, MacEwen was aware that she could be labeled as an apologist for British imperialism by mere writing about him in a sympathetic way. him. So she felt compelled to stress to her Arab friends that she was writing about the man only in as much at it related to his conduct in the theatre of war, his quest at liberating Damascus, which turned into a blood bath where Turkish soldiers were slaughtered as prisoners , and even their horses were not spared in that vengeful alliance between Lawrence and his Arab allies, following a Turkish massacre of Arab civilians. The poet graphically describes the horrors in the poem Tafas, describing in verse, Lawrence's sanguinary thoughts of revenge : We went after the Turks/ And killed them all./ Then we blew in the heads of the animals./ The sweet salt blood/of the child ran out, and out/and on and on/ All the way to Damascus.

Sullivan suggests that Gwendolyn identified with a man who was "caught in a long dark night of the soul." MacEwen romanticizes Lawrence's image to the extent of describing his eyes as nuggets of gold . This gold also went into her novel on Akhenaton, King of Egypt, King of Dreams, (MacMillan, Toronto, 1971) and into a earlier poetry volume, The Shadow Maker (MacMillan, Toronto, 1969) and then went on to attach itself to a sun worshipping pharaoh, and then on Lawrence.

The Mystical Side of MacEwen and Biographical Side

In a time before burgeoning feminism , MacEwen had the tenacity to suggest that women were not celebrating their own sexuality enough, in Canada, and worse associated with Irving Layton, a poet not a few women considered a misogynist.

A week before she died I received a bizarre phone call from her requesting my opinion on whether it would be appropriate for her to put together an anthology of her favorite male poets. Being the cynic that I was, I naturally dismissed the idea as being too eccentric considering the developing climate of sexual politics.

But MacEwen was one poet who transcended a fashionable political climate, a poet whose work was not moth-eaten by time, by a preoccupation with righteous political causes . The life force that looked after MacEwen's muse was of a cosmic origin. For why else was she enamored with that cosmonaut warrior of the Hollywood film, Star Wars, Luke Skywalker, the fair-haired warrior who crossed phallic lamp swords with Darth Vader, a villain who appeared on the silver screen looking something between a football linesman, and beefy Dixie traffic cop, armadillo- armored, an upscale lunatic. There was something of the Arthurian in Luke Skywalker, who put on the airs of a cosmic wanabee Galahad, even as he heard schizoid messages to trust in the force from a kindly mentor slain by cruel Vader; who we are shocked to discover, turns out to be Luke's biological father".

That force for MacEwen was a "sixth sense". It was a view that was conveyed in a foreword to some of her poems published in an anthology and source book of Canadian literature, Transitions 11: Poetry( Comcept Publishing Ltd, Vancouver, 1978, now defunct). In that short preamble titled Constructing A Myth, she spoke of her divine inspiration, declaring that she wrote poems " to make sense of the chaotic nature of experience . . ."

The Deep Dark Pool

Further on in that declaration she states that her purpose was to build a bridge between the "inner world of the psyche and the " outer" world of things. Language for MacEwen had enormous magical power. It invoked mysterious forces, which he believed visited the poet in dreams. " I am drawn to ancient religions and symbols as surely as a thirsty animal is drawn to deep dark pool of water on a hot afternoon." She then states that she sees her reflection in that opaque water , informing the poet tasters that they would be amazed at what would discover there in the water. She referred to that "fertile water" as containing "wonderful, rich , mysterious things--all part of the fabulous and frightening miracle of Being."

She further suggests that the initiate in poetry might begin a poem with the following lines: Do not imagine that the exploration ends" or with another line, We did not anticipate you, bright ones . Gold again. Who are the bright ones? Are they messengers, angels?

What philosophical trout dwell within those black waters reminiscent of an archetypal northern lake. She invites us to contemplate this sacred ecology: That this land like a mirror turns you inward/And you become a forest in a furtive lake. The reader is then invited to join the landscape by becoming arboreal at one with the sky and We have only to submerge in these waters water. This poem provides nourishment for the traveler in that quest for eternal life?. This is a softer and more endearing hunger. It is a hunger that does not a sound of teeth cracking a lobster's claw like a bark of protest from a pre-human world, nor is it is an appetite for any prehistory attached to marine life, or edibles like smoked oysters, scarlet lobsters, shining shrimps . . ."

Nor does poet beg forgiveness from "The Lord of the Infinite buffet"---forgiveness for a second, and third helping. This is a guiltless and timeless landscape where The dark pines of your mind reach downward,/ You dream in the green of your time,/ Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

In the second part of this poem, MacEwen, refers to an explorer, which I must assume is her muse, a voice within telling her: Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for/ Although it is good here and green; The poet is angling for something , although there is no trout in this poem, I still feel she is fishing for immortality. But what is good and green? Forests do provide a peaceful canopy, not just against the rain and the wind, but conceal you from the cares and terrors of the world. Those dark pines half submerged in the dark waters of a large northern lake, offers in the words of the poet, a heavy grace, an anguished dream. Allowing the dreamer deeper into another realm in an elementary world . . .

Trusting In the Force and the Darkness of Hyper Reality

Does the clue lie further in her mini-essay with her view that poetry stems from "here and now?" That poetry can "dive into the past and future with blinding speed." She offers the film Star Wars as an example where "wisdom of the past is used to deal with situations of the future." She would have us believe that we are citizens of the past and of the future as well as of the present. She offers us in effect time travel through the force of poetry . Imagine the reaction of the psychiatric admissions person receiving MacEwen for the very first time in the drug and alcohol addiction unit of the Clarke Institute in Toronto, and his reaction? I suspect that that this clinician would have instantly equated poetry with madness, and confined the patient for observation in a patterned hypo-manic observation room. MacEwen trusted in the force but it did save her from the ravages of alcohol addiction. All her adult life she feared madness, to be institutionalized like her schizophrenic mother Elsie, or going the way of her Alcoholic father, Alix, and so she sought to hide that ugliness from her confidants, and reinvent her self going from one psychic incarnation to another.

Sullivan goes to great lengths to prove this point. MacEwen trusted in cosmology, as revealed in her selected poems, Afterworlds, in one poem, in a comet shedding fire, blind seed--- Therefore the true poet lives beyond the world, and in the aftermath of those violent skies there is a next awakening.. We have only to immerse ourself in a deep dark , or find ourselves in a procreative cosmic shower, a runaway asteroid, a messenger, or the Bright Ones?

Yet what is certain is that an artist needs inspirational fuel, or food in the presence of adversity.

In her poem, Marino Martin's Horses, from that same volume, Afterworlds, (publisher, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1987) for which she received a governor-general's grant posthumously, the poet embraces the inevitable darkness with these lines: All we have to give each other is/Our breath, our darkness breathing/Life into the dying lungs of the night. And in the next stanza: Enter my darkness, I give you/ My darkness; Together for one second we are light.

The poet rides with this dark force confessing that We proceed in beautiful devastating stages/Towards our end, as the horse and rider/Collapse together in the catastrophe of love. The curtain falls for poet and rider. They are slowly devoured by inevitable darkness. Calmly she affirms the following: I lie in the night of your breath, Soon their breath, or soul, conjoin in this romance between poet and rider., So is intense is that moment that The horse dissoves between the rider's thighs,/The world dissolves before the rider's eyes. And what perfect ending to this poem with the poet welcoming the inevitable darkness : So now in the animal darkness, come.

I am reminded of Emily Dickensen's morbid obsession with death and her quest for immortality. It is present in her most memorable poem, Because I Could Stop For Death. In this clever poem Death, a Dark Coachman kindly invites for a carriage ride. Those mnemonic lines still sing in my brain: Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; /The carriage held but just ourselves/ And Immortality.

That carriage ride, too, is a ride into the animal darkness.

Joe Rosenblatt